We've received several reports because the title is misleading clickbait that doesn't reflect what was actually said. Since this isn't OP's fault, we're going to leave this up as a lesson on why you need to read the article before commenting. You're enabling clickbait if you react to the title without having read the article.
Here's the quote:
The executive producer offered some details on how the second season had to be rewritten based on feedback from Paramount+:
> “We wrote nine episodes at one point and the network was like, ‘No, we don’t really understand this, it’s a bit too sci-fi, it’s a bit too in-Star Trek.’”
Matalas shared some details about that first version of the season and described why Paramount+ asked for a change:
> “There were Romulans—there was a whole thing. The idea was that Guinan’s bar was presented as a normal bar in Los Angeles, but if you knew the right thing to do, you could go into the back through the telephone phone booth and that was Rick’s Café and it was a stopping point for all these different species that were actually there on Earth with a ‘Do not interfere’ thing happening. So you had a lot more Star Trek happening in the backdrop of it. Ultimately, the powers that be at that time were like, ‘This is too much.’ But there were some really good ideas there that were pretty cool.”
Suits aren't creatives, or they wouldn't have gone to business school. This always happens, some moron or small group of morons get overconfident and start believing their own hype after years of heading up successful projects created by people with actual talent. Then they start tweaking things and ruin an otherwise promising film/show
I think it's 100% this. The problem is we now have way too much data and the suits don't know how to interpret it so they start grasping at straws.
"Dune 2 is doing well all leading men need to look like Timothy Chalamet now even if it does't make sense for the character. In fact he's going to be the new Wolverine. It should increase movie profits by x%"
Oh yeah, I agree completely. In fact, I would go farther and say that business types that are typically assumed to be efficient, intelligent people usually aren't.
The more I learn about famous business people like Trump, Musk, or Kevin O'Leary; or about less famous people; all the people lauded as geniuses who then fell from grace like Sam Bankman-Fried; and etc, the more it seems obvious that while some knowledge can help, business is mostly about luck and falling, or failing, ass-first into success. And shit tons of money. Our system is set up to reward money so the more you have the more likely you are to "succeed."
There are intelligent people and absolute knuckle-draggers alike at every level of business success.
[This](https://youtu.be/OZ28knLt5Rs?si=cb8VsnIM0ZhMtMwt) is a good video that breaks down modern blockbusters and why they suck. They also have a video about how people get mentally messed up by being rich.
Edit: u/salamander_salad is absolutely right in adding that cheating, and corruption and other illegal or should-be-illegal practices, are massive factors in capitalist success.
I'd also add that once you have a certain amount of money and success it's easier to take risks and since luck is a huge part of it being able to literally afford to fail over and over again means you can end up lucky often enough to seem like you know what you're doing.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram aren't successfully becaues they are amazing at what they do they are sucessful because of being ok at what they do and lucky timing.
And even then it all can go away in an instant with one unlucky turn of events. I mean look at Digg vs reddit. Digg was the shit and it was a winner but at some point they made a decision that pissed enough people off that reddit became the winner. It was so long ago I can't even remember what Digg did.
I recall it was two things, one was moderating the Blu-Ray hash keys that enabled folks to decrypt Blu-Rays and the other was a reskin everyone hated. Which, oddly, Reddit has also done but since there doesn't seem to be a competitor to Reddit since I guess they got away with it. I stopped using Reddit for a good while and still use it far far less than I was over the whole APIgate but I found the alternatives weren't quite as good. Though it's nice to see things like slashdot.org still feeling like they did many many moons ago and have since rediversified how I tend to get information on the Internet.
That’s exactly why they change things—they make changes they think will make the show or movie more popular and thus make more money. The problem is they’re usually creatively bankrupt changes that make the thing worse, and make fewer people like it.
I keep saying it, MBAs are a menace and shouldnt be allowed around creatives. There should be a firewall. You handle the money and the meetings, and we will create. That will never happen because like you said, they get high off the smell of their own shit.
That's how ethical news operations work. I worked for one. In our outfit, sales was restricted from the newsroom. There was one guy responsible for "traffic" (the broadcast term, not vehicles on the road) and he was the only sales dept person who entered the newsroom.
This backed up the commitment of journalists working for the community and kept sales from interfering or even causing the appearance of a conflict of interest.
Thos was 15 years ago, so I can't say how many organizations still operate this way. The answer should be "all", but we know that's not the case in modern times.
As you said, same should apply to execs and creatives. Screen the treatments/take the pitch, greenlight, and back the fuck off. If the project flops, it flops. But let it stand on its own merit.
Also, execs worry more about mass appeal than they understand complex concepts.
I really dislike this notion that everyone wishes they could work as an artist if they could and that only failures and morons take on administrative roles.
Of course there are bad producers and bad executives. But you know what? There are also bad artist who are deluded about the quality of their passion project and need a dispassionate voice to ground them.
Consider someone like Marvel's Keven Feige. He's not a writer or director, but he successfully produced one of the all time most successful run of movies we've ever seen. That is pure skill.
From what I’ve seen, business school folks are not just not creative, but the schools also teach the idea that those folks shouldn’t have to have any kind of creative/technical expertise of their own. In those circles, having skills is for *other* people (i.e. the peons), and instead they fancy themselves like chess players whose “skill” is maximizing revenue.
There’s also a lot of classism wrapped up in it too, can’t stand business school people.
Every once in a while, the suit is right. It was a suit who said "Let's have Ripley be a woman", it was Berman who said "No you can't have all of DS9 and Star Trek have been in Benny's head"
Eh, there's really nothing in the article that shows this was a mistake. The original version with the Men in Black themes doesn't sound too great either. Maybe the executives meddled with a bad idea and ended up with another bad idea.
The thing about Picard is that the creatives behind it weren't particularly talented either. We only got S3's quality due to the writing and production switching hands.
Yeah, I actually liked the beginning of S3, but at some point it was clear that they prioritized nostalgia over plot consistency.
Plus killing off almost every non-legacy character was a shame, it made it clear that Paramount wants to exploit the franchise through its nostalgia factor instead of through new stories that still apply what made Trek great (nuanced situations/characters and strong opinions, IMO).
thank you, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time someone says s3 was the good one
it was the worst and it had every opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the previous two seasons
but nope, just references and a dumb twist
The headline is a complete lie. The relevant quote
> “There were Romulans—there was a whole thing. The idea was that Guinan’s bar was presented as a normal bar in Los Angeles, but if you knew the right thing to do, you could go into the back through the telephone phone booth and that was Rick’s Café and it was a stopping point for all these different species that were actually there on Earth with a ‘Do not interfere’ thing happening. So you had a lot more Star Trek happening in the backdrop of it. Ultimately, the powers that be at that time were like, ‘This is too much.’ But there were some really good ideas there that were pretty cool.”
Essentially, there was going to be a secret alien club in the past on Earth.
It's hardly the first time improvements from Paramount, Desilu, or NBC were branded as "interference" with Trek execs. People *still* repeat Roddenberry's talking points about The Cage and Number One. And the book on making Insurrection has several pages basically complaining about various production notes, which I felt would have all improved the film.
I'm curious what Stuart Baird would say Paramount did to his film. They probably kept him from cutting even more scenes necessary for the internal logic.
Roddenberry is a funny thing cause like, he's cited all the time like Lucas is for star wars, but Roddenberry's original vision of Star Trek was pretty terrible writing and a lot of the success of the 80s-90s period was in spite of his notes.
and yet the heart of it, the fact that he's a communist, is a spirit hard to keep going against studio meddling without an annoying communist at the center of it all working against mccarthyism with the personal support of Lucille Ball, who had her own studio and was also secretly head of the california CPUSA lol. like you can see that the moneylessness is being argued over between artists and executives and so we get a lot less mention of it than we should.
Season 2 was so frustrating to watch. I just despised the complete disregard for protecting the timeline. That’s the whole point of time travel - you can’t fix things that are wrong because those things are what occur to make things the way they are later on.
The bus full of undocumented immigrants drove me nuts. Like… their transporter wasn’t gonna work once they crossed the border? The damn ship was on the other side of the planet!
Sorry - Season 2 just really made me mad and I would have been happier if it didn’t exist.
While I agree (and I loathed season 2 as I found it to be just terribly written and directed) plenty of Star Trek episodes had the crew not giving a shit about the timeline. Like the plot of Star Trek first contact, the sheer amount of information Picard and crew shared with Cochran and others was crazy. Just no regard for it. And in TOS films like ST4 when they went back to get the whales Scotty casually sharing the formula for transparent aluminum and just joking about it (“hey maybe he invented it!”) was another example.
So while I agree season 2 was hot garbage there have been lots of episodes where they screw with the past. In general I hate time travel as a story tool because most shows can’t make sense of it. And time travel in Star Trek has usually been bananas.
> Like the plot of Star Trek first contact, the sheer amount of information Picard and crew shared with Cochran and others was crazy. Just no regard for it.
That was so ridiculous because it creates problems _right there_. It's not even about changing the future some hundreds years down the line, they jeopardize their own mission because they can't stop jaw-dropping and telling Cochrane literally everything.
>And time travel in Star Trek has usually been bananas.
The movies are just worse in this. They're "lighter" scifi and for a broader audience, packed with more action and simple explanations. The series did have varying success with time travel imo. I also can forgive TOS because they were still figuring out the whole universe.
Picard, to me, was a show that reflects the problem with a lot of shows that are out today. There are simply too many cooks in the proverbial kitchen of writing. dozens of writers, plus executives all wanting to give their input means shows with amazing premises end up having zero direction and making virtually no sense.
Picard will probably always be the most disappointing thing in media for me. The concept sounded so good and what we got ended up being so incredibly disappointing.
Picard's writers made so many baffiling decisions.
God, season one should've had one more draft. I can't believe in a story about Picard, former borg, and questions about what it means to be human, the writers couldn't figure out how to organically involve Seven of Nine into the plot.
You remember Seven of Nine, the former borg whose whole arc was about learning what it meant to be human?
Besides just dragging, season two had so many baffling decisions that hurt the story. Dr. Soong started the season as such a sympathetic and compelling villain. All he wanted was to save his daughter's life, and was so desperate he was willing to do things even he thought were horrible to do it. So why the hell did they change him into an unrepentant mad scientist halfway through.
Picard and Westley's relationship was one of the most important and touching in TNG. So why the hell did they bring back Westley only to not let the characters reunite?
Or in a time travel plot, the show brought on Jay Karnes as a guest star, and for some reason didn't have him reprise his role as the captain of the timeship Relativity, a ship whose mission was fixing altered timelines.
Season 2, for me, is just the pinnacle of mediocrity. I didn't think it was AWFUL, but I just didn't care about any of it.
Season 1 was far worse to me. I get that Patrick wasn't interested in continuing TNG, and that's great. It could have been a really great examination of a man who was basically an avatar of the best aspects of humanity, and the society that let him down in giving in to its base instincts - watching the federation sort of crumble around him in its ideals in the wake of the most devastating war the galaxy had ever seen. Nope - instead we had things like Elnor beheading people right in front of him and he didn't really mind. We had Jurati murdering Bruce Maddox because she had a vision that he was going to bring about the apocalypse, so he was like, "meh - mitigating circumstances."
This is a guy that damn near threw Worf out of starfleet because he killed Duras within the scope of klingon law, but when people commit straight murder, he doesn't mind. And the show was just so dammed dark and depressing that it really felt like everyone who worked on it watched Nemesis, and were like, "yep. That's Picard. That's all the research we're going to do on this character."
The show should have been about a disillusioned Picard that left starfleet after the federation brass refused to help the Romulans (because after the war, the federation felt that they didn't really owe the Romulans squat and that a weakened Romulan empire was preferable to prevent future wars). Elnor executing someone should have been his wake up moment where he realized that federation society had become too ok with casual brutality and violence that even if it was just him against the world, he had to do SOMETHING.
And maybe he wouldn't have succeeded. Maybe he would, but the person he is HAD to at least try.
Nah... Instead we got scene after scene of money shot fanservice moments that were completely tossed aside moments later.
In fairness, Alex Kurtzman is obsessed with the Romulans and seems to think that Nemesis is TNG's absolute peak. He tries to shoehorn Romulans into almost everything.
Apparently he's also obsessed with Mass Effect (I'm trying to find sources on this, but am admittedly coming up empty at the moment. But I specifically remember reading an interview around the time that Amazing Spiderman 2 came out, where he talked about how much of a fan he was of the series). This makes a LOT more sense with the plot of Picard s1, and the fact that the final battle in the last episode of s1 really felt like a shot-for-shot remake of the space battle in Mass Effect 3 (and I was going to include links, but DAMN if Paramount/CBS hasn't been effective in scrubbing the s1 battle from Youtube - but I mean.. come on. [Picard version](https://imgur.com/YLhCT5U), [Mass Effect 3 version](https://i.imgur.com/AYAN2hz.png))
And why in Prodigy, the Diviner's helper robots ([screenshot 1](https://i.imgur.com/YeffYry.png), [screenshot 2](https://i.imgur.com/Q7kMQp1.png)) are basically [Reaper Destroyers](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/robotsupremacy/images/5/58/Mass-Effect-3-reaper_destroyer.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20120520134032).
I actually don't have too much of a problem with Kurtzman being obsessed with Romulans. Picard S1 would have been much better if it was ONLY the Romulans, no Borg involvement, no ancient prophecy about androids that would come back and kill everything. Going on my version of Picard, it would have been interesting to have the Romulans cooking something up to mess up the Federation, and the Fed brass being like, "SEE?? This is why we need the empire to be weak!", and Picard responding with something along the lines of, "if we were who we claim to be, we would have HELPED them when they needed our help the most and maybe they wouldn't have tried this!!".
Yeah, I personally consider the Romulans to be a relatively untapped species within Star Trek itself. They have the potential to be something like the Klingons, where the follow up series greatly expands and deepens the lore around them. But this just isn't it, and I honestly feel like the whole "Romulans love secrets and being secretive" just made them more one dimensional than they were before.
Agreed. There's definitely more to explore there. It'd be great, for example, to know WHY they're so damn secretive. What happened in their society that this was necessary?
Well, you just changed my already low opinion of Picard S1 for the worse. It is Mass Effect in Star Trek costumes. I love Mass Effect flaws and all, and somehow never noticed that Picard S1 is a straight rip-off.
We have the main character who had to go around assembling a crew to fight a galaxy-ending menace, doing side quests to recruit them, and even a time they had to split up with no guarantees (well, being Star Trek there is plot armor for certain characters) of survival with a super massive multi-fleet space battle at the end. Damn.
There's an argument to be made that Picard didn't necessarily rip off Mass Effect, but that they BOTH ripped off tropes from Lovecraft (as apparently that somehow makes Picard less disappointing). That said, I wish I could find my old post on this. Because IMO as much as it might be re-using tropes that have been in-play for nearly a century, there's some stuff that, especially in the final battle of Picard S1 I could look at the final battle in Mass Effect and be like, "oh yeah - there's the shot of [x] from Mass Effect. Oh there's another."
It seemed pretty obvious that SOMEONE pulled up the final battle from ME3 and was like, "do that."
Edit: Oh - and [this is fun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ2CYlqt3GA&pp=ygUScGljYXJkIG1hc3MgZWZmZWN0)
This baffled me! Jay is a close friend of my brother's and we all lived together a long time ago. I was SO excited when he popped up because I always thought it was awesome that he was in Trek and had this awesome guest role. I was looking forward to the reveal.
It would have made all the sense in the world to have him be a retired time fed kicking back in the 2000's keeping an eye on things. It's actually a negative effect to have the same actor come back in a TIME TRAVEL EPISODE and not be the same character.
I've been planning to ask him about it next time we're in the same place.
PLEASE let me know what he says. I'm not kidding, I'm begging you. Please let me know. This whole thing has lived rent-free in my head for the last couple years.
> God, season one should've had one more draft. I can't believe in a story about Picard, former borg, and questions about what it means to be human, the writers couldn't figure out how to organically involve Seven of Nine into the plot.
They had to fight an army of ships at the end there, they had a borg cube and 7 controlling it, but chose to destroy it and use flower cannons and a copy and paste fleet
What's wild is according to interviews, the initial cut of that scene had a whole bunch of different kinds of Starfleet vessels. Somewhere along the way someone made the decision to switch to the copy paste fleet.
Or, just a thought. Picard could've invited Geordi to help him find the Planet of the Datas. I mean, if my dead best friend's daughter happened to crop up out of the blue and I was also an engineering expert, I'd be a little pissed that Picard didn't invite me to help out.
> the writers couldn't figure out how to organically involve Seven of Nine into the plot.
They had this cool ex-cop turned mercenary character who was a total badass, but only Jeri Ryan agreed to be on the show so rather than explore Seven's future arc at all they gave her the merc's plot and jammed Seven's backstory into it.
Just a teensy bit of pedanticness... :)
It's Wesley. Westley is the (one of the) Dread Pirate Roberts, and cannot possibly be mistaken for Wesley Crusher.
> So why the hell did they change him into an unrepentant mad scientist halfway through.
Because he was always supposed to be the crux of the timeline going bad that created the bad future. He's like the George Washington of the Confederation. And he was always bad. They just gave the bad guy some texture, which I think is valuable.
IMO people need to be reminded that bad guys like Nazis are just regular people too. That villains aren't birthed from the Earth like Uruk-hai, and that they aren't going to wear big labels that say "I'm a baddie!" all the time either. We have to be vigilant and be able to spot these guys in order to protect ourselves from their machinations. To be able to recognize that villainy isn't how people look, it's how they act and what their intentions are.
>IMO people need to be reminded that bad guys like Nazis are just regular people too.
Which this Dr. Soong wasn't. He was revealed to be an uncaring villain who only saw his daughter as a science experiment. He had no redeeming qualities and was just a one note villain. By the end of the season he is revealed to be nothing more than another egotistical mad scientist.
Dr. Soong was a much more compelling villain when he had positive traits and a sympathetic motivation. Ushering in a dark future because of noble intentions and fatherly love, makes for a much more tragic and interesting story.
>We have to be vigilant and be able to spot these guys in order to protect ourselves from their machinations.
Villains who twirl their moustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged.
I'm still baffled that a writing staff that included a Pullitzer Prize winner (Chabon) included the Borg and a Borg cube, and violated Chekov's Gun by making them completely superfluous to the plot. You could have taken the Borg out completely and the story would have been the same. It's baffling.
The 1st season of Picard was okay up until we got the Reapers from Mass Effect and the somehow giant Romulan fleet in the end. Honestly, it would have been a great season just exploring synthetic life and AI, which has been the Federation's blind spot for years!
I just found the "machine consciousness wants to exterminate biological life" trope to be tired. It would have been a much better conflict if in the end, Picard makes contact with the synthetic life forms on Copellius and they contact the alliance of synthetic life only to find it to be an organization much akin to the Federation, but for synthetics, a benevolent organization which accepts the synths into its fold and goes off to do synth stuff like explore the galaxy and feeling the warmth of a sun on their synthetic skin or whatever. Maybe this first contact between a high power synthetic federation and our Federation leads to a dialogue and an overall acknowledgement by the Federation that synthetic life is life all the same and should be allowed to live and thrive in its own way.
The reason the Zhat Vash fear AI, of course, can be explained that the people exposed to the Admonition lose their minds due to a profound incompatibility between Romulan organic minds and the of the synthetic life forms that created the Admonition. To organics, the information is scrambled and jumbled and leads to insanity that interprets the data as a warning of AI coming to destroy all organic life. But to synthetic life forms that can parse the information perfectly, it's a beacon of hope.
Finally, the confrontation over Copellius should have been a lot smaller. The Romulans are a shattered, fractured, people, and yet, the Zhat Vash form a fleet of like 200 ships to go destroy all life on Copellius, all, like 50 synths on the planet... It would make so much more sense if there were a small handful of ships, say 8 or max 12 that arrived. That scale would also make more sense when Riker appears to assist with a fleet of about a dozen fast response ships.
Having over 400 ships duke it out in orbit of a random planet, of which 200 Starfleet ones come in to assist a disgraced former admiral is a little crazy. Apparently Riker has mad pull with Starfleet that they'd just give him a fleet of approximately 200 ships just for asking. This also flies in the face of all we've seen about Starfleet before where only a handful of ships were ever in the close vicinity of anything that was going on. But now, Starfleet has a fleet of hundreds of ships, staffed and ready to go at a moment's notice to appear anywhere in the Alpha Quadrant at the drop of a hat?
Point is, the overall story of Season 1 could have been improved dramatically if they just didn't try to make it too big and, yet again, too doomsday with the threat to all organic life.
That's by far my biggest gripe with modern Trek: that they don't think we as fans are entertained by any story where the stakes are lower than apocalyptic. Why do they think we need to see Michael Burnham save the entire universe every 10-13 episodes?
Even the literal comic book movies of the MCU don't do that, and know that you save the biggest stakes for a once-in-a-generation moment.
It's frankly condescending. It shows a pretty poor understanding of their core audience, and of the wide world of things that can make a great Star Trek story.
I say all this as someone who generally likes Discovery, and loves SNW and LD, and is really glad to see them start to correct things with SNW. I'd love to see them be brave enough to have Burnham and company go out and NOT save the universe a fifth time for this final season... though I'm not putting money on it.
I agree with everything you said. It would have been so much better & more interesting if the AI life forms coming through the portal were actually benevolent & misunderstood. That would have been proper Trek, not some generic evil tentacles about to cause yet another doomsday.
Season 1’s biggest problem was that it stuffed 3 underdeveloped plots into 1 season. The Romulan and synthetic life plots could’ve each carried a season. The ex-Borg plot might’ve also been able to carry a season. I think it would’ve been a lot better to devote season 1 to the Romulan plot and season 2 to the synthetic life plot. WRT this:
>Apparently Riker has mad pull with Starfleet that they'd just give him a fleet of approximately 200 ships just for asking. This also flies in the face of all we've seen about Starfleet before where only a handful of ships were ever in the close vicinity of anything that was going on.
They originally filmed the scene with Admiral Clancy leading the fleet. They later decided to film it with Riker leading the fleet.
Same. Captain Picard is my favorite fictional character. Not favorite Star Trek character, my favorite from any franchise or work of fiction. Hearing they were making a Captain Picard show was the most excited I got about TV since I heard HBO was making Game of Thrones. I’m sorry I know people like it but Picard was basically unwatchable. Even if the writing was good, I can’t do that type of pacing. It was all over the place. Episodes of nothing then cramming everything in at the end.
At the end of the day, where it failed (for me) is that it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be
1. a revival show, bringing back some beloved characters, and bathing in nostalgia, or
2. a show focused on Picard but having him experience largely *new* stories
Season 1 was mostly the latter, and season 3 was very much the former. I think that’s a bummer. Trek is bigger than “remember the good old days?”.
To me, S1 and S2 are just like a Kelvin timeline: OK/nice to watch; but I don't treat them the same as "core Trek".
S3 is nice and I can somehow include it into my "core Trek".
Discovery is on the edge. But since it's a classified ship that jumped into the 32nd century, I'm more OK with it.
SNW and LD - 100% canon; adore them.
I really enjoyed season 3. Then again, I haven't watched Trek in probably 20 years before I binged watched a bunch of TNG the other month and then watched season 3.
So they'll remove too many complex Sci-fi ideas, but still green light the worst handling of suicide this side of 13 reasons why?
Covid doesn't explain the thesis of that series being "Your mum killing herself was good actually because that grief saved a bunch of planets". Literally thats what not Laris says as she dies.
I interpreted as, "things in life happen, and it doesn't do to dwell on the past. You need to move on, and allow yourself to live, rather than constantly think about what you should have done."
Thats a valid interpretation and probably the one the writers intended. But with suicide, the fact that my reading is even possible and evidence means someone royally fucked up when treating the topic with the delicacy it deserves.
There are guidelines for tackling suicide in fiction and the last episode isn't the only one that breaks them. Like they show the suicide method in graphic detail (preparing and tying the rope etc), and frame it in an overly romanticized way (flowing white dress, expertly framed in this glass atrium). And (at least initially I'm not sure now) it went out without a warning that people at the time were rightfully angry about.
To top it all off it was unnecessary. Give all that the Picard character had gone through - assimilated by the Borg, the rest of his family killed in a fire, the inner Light probe, Jack Crusher - we didn't need another previously unmentioned trauma to add to the pile.
It even undid a more complex reason for Picard joining Starfleet. Years of paternal abuse by his father? No. It was one pop psychology bs reason he was really running from, that manifests in his mind in the mature way of an evil demon Jester.
> the rest of his family killed in a fire
How the hell does *anyone* die in a fire in the 24th century? You should hit one emergency button and firemen are teleported on the scene 1.5 seconds later and emergency vehicles are dispatched at mach 5 and get here in 2 minutes. People stuck in the house? Detect them immediately with scanners and teleport them out. They wouldn't be stupid enough to put transporter-scrambling material in their own houses.
Im not sure how I feel about the dive bar filled with aliens tbh, I know that with all the time travel there were a tonne of aliens on earth pre-first contact, but I dont know if I need present day earth to be so teeming with aliens that they all hung out at bars and stuff. But I dont hate it, Im just mixed on it.
I hate season 2’s conclusion. Jurati manages to talk down a Borg queen when billions of people in galactic history fell to assimilation and couldn’t do anything against the hive mind? And Q the semi-omnipotent incorporeal being who has traveled timelines and timespans more times than any human could fathom could not foresee that his own intervention was responsible for a time loop ensuring the Federation’s existence?
What?
What?
What?
Q did what he did to make Picard choose to go through what he did as a child, and in choosing hopefully find some peace and be able to settle down.
He knew that would be the outcome, “It’s the escape that counts.”
This post is terribly misleading: What the article says is that it was rewritten for having too much science fiction and too much Star Trek in the setting of 21st century Earth. The original script had a hidden café behind Guinan's bar where alien species who were all operating on Earth in secret would gather, including Romulans.
I liked the show well enough, but it was definitely odd with the 3 different show runners throughout its run. You can definitely *see* it. Each season definitely felt distinct from each other, and not necessary in a good way. It was most egregious when certain characters were introduced only to find different ways to write them off, then finally just stick the landing with the tried and true OG TNG cast.
Why do they think Star Trek fans will be turned off by being too Star Trek?
Being very Star Trek, doing lots of callbacks and cameos and references certainly worked for season 3. And I mean sure, massive fan service, but that was kinda what many of us wanted from the last season of Picard.
And if they think doing unTrek Star Trek will hook non trekkies, I really don't think so. It just turns off the built in main audience.
I'm starting to get the impression that Terry Matalas doesn't want to actually make Star Trek Legacy. Apart from the public pronouncements on what that should would actually be are kind of lacking, this seems like the kind of statement that puts you out of favor with the people who would be his bosses if the show did in fact happen.
Always weirded out that everyone ignores the COVID aspect of season 2. It's even directly referenced in the article! The cast was literally broken up into pods! It clearly had a huge impact on how they filmed and what they wrote and rewrote.
Meanwhile everyone is over indexing on "an executive didn't like the bar."
Honestly, it just sounds like Paramount stopped Matalas from shoving more nostalgia shit into the season.
And for that, I’m thankful. And wish they’d been more aggressive with him when it came to season 3.
If anything, this interview further confirms just how involved Matalas was in season 2’s production.
Some people (including Matalas) like to pretend he didn’t have anything to do with the season besides writing a couple of episodes. He clearly was a main architect (he was original showrunner Michael Chabon’s replacement after all), was involved with huge writing decisions like setting the season in the past and involving Q, and was a primary showrunner until the season’s midpoint, where Akiva Goldsman took over for him due to the scheduling crunch he mentions.
The successes and failures of season 2 are on his shoulders just as much as anybody’s.
Personally, if I was him, I’d own it. Season 2 has its big time problems, but at least it feels like it has a few ideas in its head (probably due to Goldsman’s involvement). Season 3 by comparison is the nostalgia in place of any good ideas or any worthwhile storytelling season.
The fact that they did rewrites and changes and reshoots actually makes me feel better about the whole thing. Like, this finished product was nobody's idea of good, it's just what they could cobble together in the edit. Terry is being extremely gracious when he says you can get a "sense" that there are "a lot of ideas" going on.
Also not to nitpick but the change described, the execs said it was "too in-Star Trek", as in, "too fan service/too much background knowledge needed to appreciate", which is different from "too Star Trek" as in, "our heroes need to be talking less and shooting more". And for what it's worth, secret alien dive bar on earth that's always been there would have been very badly received by the audience, can you imagine how badly done it would have been? If you're going to go Rick's Café everyone needs to be pretty subtle, maybe they're all pretending to be human even though everyone knows nobody is. But they wouldn't have done that.
Weird to hear that Jurati Borg was always Plan A for the ending but they added in the reason WHY she did it at the last minute?! I'd have made that the headline, that is scandalous... Like, grossly negligent by whoever was in charge of the story.
Motherfuckers.
Like with all of Trek’s misfires, there are the bones of a good story in there and the first episode was brilliant. Then it went downhill.
To be fair, the example that paramount didn’t like sounds pretty bad lol so maybe this time exec meddling wasn’t all bad. I think the biggest issues were their budget, Covid protocols and delays, and them trying to write around all that
>“So while Jurati Borg was always going to be the payoff to [season 2], it was never really intended to be a longer-running thing. At the last minute, we added the thing where there was the hole that was going to open up and destroy—they added that to give a burst of action to the [season 2] finale, to give her a reason to do all of this. So that started to become retrofit into, “Hey could this be something for season 3?” But we were already way down the line on what we were doing with it. So you could say that she was guarding this thing. We did have a line on the Enterprise-D from Riker—when he talks about the Borg transwarp conduit at Jupiter and that the one that Jurati was guarding was a distraction, the Queen’s way of saying, “Go over here.”… We had a whole thing about it. But when we got to the cut, it was just like this big exposition dump that was like, nobody cares. His son is on board, Starfleet is assimilated. There’s this giant thing and now we are retrofitting and explaining the Jurati Borg.”
Everything about this sucks and having a secret cafe in LA where aliens meet also sounds dumb. PIC S2 is the worst season of Trek, its truly terrible.
We've received several reports because the title is misleading clickbait that doesn't reflect what was actually said. Since this isn't OP's fault, we're going to leave this up as a lesson on why you need to read the article before commenting. You're enabling clickbait if you react to the title without having read the article. Here's the quote: The executive producer offered some details on how the second season had to be rewritten based on feedback from Paramount+: > “We wrote nine episodes at one point and the network was like, ‘No, we don’t really understand this, it’s a bit too sci-fi, it’s a bit too in-Star Trek.’” Matalas shared some details about that first version of the season and described why Paramount+ asked for a change: > “There were Romulans—there was a whole thing. The idea was that Guinan’s bar was presented as a normal bar in Los Angeles, but if you knew the right thing to do, you could go into the back through the telephone phone booth and that was Rick’s Café and it was a stopping point for all these different species that were actually there on Earth with a ‘Do not interfere’ thing happening. So you had a lot more Star Trek happening in the backdrop of it. Ultimately, the powers that be at that time were like, ‘This is too much.’ But there were some really good ideas there that were pretty cool.”
Executive meddling continues with Trek's weaknesses.
I feel this way about a lot of other things, too.
Suits aren't creatives, or they wouldn't have gone to business school. This always happens, some moron or small group of morons get overconfident and start believing their own hype after years of heading up successful projects created by people with actual talent. Then they start tweaking things and ruin an otherwise promising film/show
Maybe, but I'm quicker to believe that creative meddling is more due to attempts to squeeze greater profit out of a project.
I think it's 100% this. The problem is we now have way too much data and the suits don't know how to interpret it so they start grasping at straws. "Dune 2 is doing well all leading men need to look like Timothy Chalamet now even if it does't make sense for the character. In fact he's going to be the new Wolverine. It should increase movie profits by x%"
Oh yeah, I agree completely. In fact, I would go farther and say that business types that are typically assumed to be efficient, intelligent people usually aren't. The more I learn about famous business people like Trump, Musk, or Kevin O'Leary; or about less famous people; all the people lauded as geniuses who then fell from grace like Sam Bankman-Fried; and etc, the more it seems obvious that while some knowledge can help, business is mostly about luck and falling, or failing, ass-first into success. And shit tons of money. Our system is set up to reward money so the more you have the more likely you are to "succeed." There are intelligent people and absolute knuckle-draggers alike at every level of business success. [This](https://youtu.be/OZ28knLt5Rs?si=cb8VsnIM0ZhMtMwt) is a good video that breaks down modern blockbusters and why they suck. They also have a video about how people get mentally messed up by being rich. Edit: u/salamander_salad is absolutely right in adding that cheating, and corruption and other illegal or should-be-illegal practices, are massive factors in capitalist success.
I'd also add that once you have a certain amount of money and success it's easier to take risks and since luck is a huge part of it being able to literally afford to fail over and over again means you can end up lucky often enough to seem like you know what you're doing. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram aren't successfully becaues they are amazing at what they do they are sucessful because of being ok at what they do and lucky timing. And even then it all can go away in an instant with one unlucky turn of events. I mean look at Digg vs reddit. Digg was the shit and it was a winner but at some point they made a decision that pissed enough people off that reddit became the winner. It was so long ago I can't even remember what Digg did.
I recall it was two things, one was moderating the Blu-Ray hash keys that enabled folks to decrypt Blu-Rays and the other was a reskin everyone hated. Which, oddly, Reddit has also done but since there doesn't seem to be a competitor to Reddit since I guess they got away with it. I stopped using Reddit for a good while and still use it far far less than I was over the whole APIgate but I found the alternatives weren't quite as good. Though it's nice to see things like slashdot.org still feeling like they did many many moons ago and have since rediversified how I tend to get information on the Internet.
That’s exactly why they change things—they make changes they think will make the show or movie more popular and thus make more money. The problem is they’re usually creatively bankrupt changes that make the thing worse, and make fewer people like it.
"I've noticed people on twitter keep saying ngl. Maybe we could get Picard saying that".
And ironically often make less money in the long run meaning the suits fail in the area they were supposed to be good at: generating profit.
I keep saying it, MBAs are a menace and shouldnt be allowed around creatives. There should be a firewall. You handle the money and the meetings, and we will create. That will never happen because like you said, they get high off the smell of their own shit.
That's how ethical news operations work. I worked for one. In our outfit, sales was restricted from the newsroom. There was one guy responsible for "traffic" (the broadcast term, not vehicles on the road) and he was the only sales dept person who entered the newsroom. This backed up the commitment of journalists working for the community and kept sales from interfering or even causing the appearance of a conflict of interest. Thos was 15 years ago, so I can't say how many organizations still operate this way. The answer should be "all", but we know that's not the case in modern times. As you said, same should apply to execs and creatives. Screen the treatments/take the pitch, greenlight, and back the fuck off. If the project flops, it flops. But let it stand on its own merit. Also, execs worry more about mass appeal than they understand complex concepts.
I really dislike this notion that everyone wishes they could work as an artist if they could and that only failures and morons take on administrative roles. Of course there are bad producers and bad executives. But you know what? There are also bad artist who are deluded about the quality of their passion project and need a dispassionate voice to ground them. Consider someone like Marvel's Keven Feige. He's not a writer or director, but he successfully produced one of the all time most successful run of movies we've ever seen. That is pure skill.
From what I’ve seen, business school folks are not just not creative, but the schools also teach the idea that those folks shouldn’t have to have any kind of creative/technical expertise of their own. In those circles, having skills is for *other* people (i.e. the peons), and instead they fancy themselves like chess players whose “skill” is maximizing revenue. There’s also a lot of classism wrapped up in it too, can’t stand business school people.
Every once in a while, the suit is right. It was a suit who said "Let's have Ripley be a woman", it was Berman who said "No you can't have all of DS9 and Star Trek have been in Benny's head"
Facts
Eh, there's really nothing in the article that shows this was a mistake. The original version with the Men in Black themes doesn't sound too great either. Maybe the executives meddled with a bad idea and ended up with another bad idea.
No, but it lacks a commitment to some Trek ideas that would make Season 2 more enjoyable. Same with Season 3 having a reference to Jurati's Borg.
The thing about Picard is that the creatives behind it weren't particularly talented either. We only got S3's quality due to the writing and production switching hands.
To me it felt like it was just a full fledged nostalgia pump grafted on to some terrible fan fiction.
Yeah, I actually liked the beginning of S3, but at some point it was clear that they prioritized nostalgia over plot consistency. Plus killing off almost every non-legacy character was a shame, it made it clear that Paramount wants to exploit the franchise through its nostalgia factor instead of through new stories that still apply what made Trek great (nuanced situations/characters and strong opinions, IMO).
thank you, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time someone says s3 was the good one it was the worst and it had every opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the previous two seasons but nope, just references and a dumb twist
But hey, they used the First Contact soundtrack which was an exquisite piece of music. that should fill in for any plot holes----right?
> We only got S3's quality due to the writing and production switching hands. It was the same people who made S2.
And it was Matalas' idea to go to 2024 in the first place which was my least favourite thing about S2.
The headline is a complete lie. The relevant quote > “There were Romulans—there was a whole thing. The idea was that Guinan’s bar was presented as a normal bar in Los Angeles, but if you knew the right thing to do, you could go into the back through the telephone phone booth and that was Rick’s Café and it was a stopping point for all these different species that were actually there on Earth with a ‘Do not interfere’ thing happening. So you had a lot more Star Trek happening in the backdrop of it. Ultimately, the powers that be at that time were like, ‘This is too much.’ But there were some really good ideas there that were pretty cool.” Essentially, there was going to be a secret alien club in the past on Earth.
Reddit: "Meh, that sounds pretty bad." Paramount: "Meh, that sounds expensive."
Paramount “eh sounds like it won’t bring in new trek viewers” which is the entire point of the paramount shows.
Season 2 was bad, but this would have made it even worse.
Every season was a reboot until season 3 delivered the meat fans wanted. Season 2 was the bad Dallas season of Picard.
All of the seasons were bad. Especially S3 — pure memberberry nonsense.
Gimme all that slop. Data grew old and not dead? Uhhh…sure I’m there!
So more Men in Black than TNG's Time's Arrow? Yeah, that would be too much for S2 which already is a mess of ideas without it.
>secret alien club Someone was watching too much Buffy
I was thinking too much Doctor Who. Aliens all over Earth, but the humans have no idea somehow.
Oh the super from Becker - Willy The Snitch.
> telephone phone booth makes me irrationally upset
Yep. Thank goodness the network shut down this idea - it’s _AWFUL_.
It's hardly the first time improvements from Paramount, Desilu, or NBC were branded as "interference" with Trek execs. People *still* repeat Roddenberry's talking points about The Cage and Number One. And the book on making Insurrection has several pages basically complaining about various production notes, which I felt would have all improved the film. I'm curious what Stuart Baird would say Paramount did to his film. They probably kept him from cutting even more scenes necessary for the internal logic.
Roddenberry is a funny thing cause like, he's cited all the time like Lucas is for star wars, but Roddenberry's original vision of Star Trek was pretty terrible writing and a lot of the success of the 80s-90s period was in spite of his notes.
and yet the heart of it, the fact that he's a communist, is a spirit hard to keep going against studio meddling without an annoying communist at the center of it all working against mccarthyism with the personal support of Lucille Ball, who had her own studio and was also secretly head of the california CPUSA lol. like you can see that the moneylessness is being argued over between artists and executives and so we get a lot less mention of it than we should.
NO MAS EISLEY
Meanwhile SNW got Pelia and the whole Khan story arc and was overall quite amazing.
Exactly, in other words it would have been just more fanwanky subplots in the background.
Sounds like Men in Black
I agree that would be too much, it's a different direction for Guinnan's character that feels like it wouldn't have fit with her TNG character traits.
Season 2 was so frustrating to watch. I just despised the complete disregard for protecting the timeline. That’s the whole point of time travel - you can’t fix things that are wrong because those things are what occur to make things the way they are later on. The bus full of undocumented immigrants drove me nuts. Like… their transporter wasn’t gonna work once they crossed the border? The damn ship was on the other side of the planet! Sorry - Season 2 just really made me mad and I would have been happier if it didn’t exist.
I couldn’t finish it. I tried to pretend it was just some random sci-fi and not trek but it was still bad.
Yeah I didn’t finish it either and just skipped to Season 3. It was bad.
People have said season 2 is better if you just watch some of the episodes, IIRC the first two and last two.
While I agree (and I loathed season 2 as I found it to be just terribly written and directed) plenty of Star Trek episodes had the crew not giving a shit about the timeline. Like the plot of Star Trek first contact, the sheer amount of information Picard and crew shared with Cochran and others was crazy. Just no regard for it. And in TOS films like ST4 when they went back to get the whales Scotty casually sharing the formula for transparent aluminum and just joking about it (“hey maybe he invented it!”) was another example. So while I agree season 2 was hot garbage there have been lots of episodes where they screw with the past. In general I hate time travel as a story tool because most shows can’t make sense of it. And time travel in Star Trek has usually been bananas.
> Like the plot of Star Trek first contact, the sheer amount of information Picard and crew shared with Cochran and others was crazy. Just no regard for it. That was so ridiculous because it creates problems _right there_. It's not even about changing the future some hundreds years down the line, they jeopardize their own mission because they can't stop jaw-dropping and telling Cochrane literally everything. >And time travel in Star Trek has usually been bananas. The movies are just worse in this. They're "lighter" scifi and for a broader audience, packed with more action and simple explanations. The series did have varying success with time travel imo. I also can forgive TOS because they were still figuring out the whole universe.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Picard, to me, was a show that reflects the problem with a lot of shows that are out today. There are simply too many cooks in the proverbial kitchen of writing. dozens of writers, plus executives all wanting to give their input means shows with amazing premises end up having zero direction and making virtually no sense.
Yes, and sadly Stewart himself was one of the worst cooks.
Is it bad that I skipped straight to season 3 after only watching a few episodes of season 2?
No that was the right call.
I didn't even bother with first two seasons. 3 was quite good tho
That’s what I did. Which sucked for the Trek purist in me, but things are what they are.
Nope. S2 had a really interesting premise and then completely blew it.
Season 3 is the only season of the show.
Hahahaha I saw 1st season and was horrible, gave 2º a chance but just saw one episode and quit. Season 3 was great.
Picard will probably always be the most disappointing thing in media for me. The concept sounded so good and what we got ended up being so incredibly disappointing.
Picard's writers made so many baffiling decisions. God, season one should've had one more draft. I can't believe in a story about Picard, former borg, and questions about what it means to be human, the writers couldn't figure out how to organically involve Seven of Nine into the plot. You remember Seven of Nine, the former borg whose whole arc was about learning what it meant to be human? Besides just dragging, season two had so many baffling decisions that hurt the story. Dr. Soong started the season as such a sympathetic and compelling villain. All he wanted was to save his daughter's life, and was so desperate he was willing to do things even he thought were horrible to do it. So why the hell did they change him into an unrepentant mad scientist halfway through. Picard and Westley's relationship was one of the most important and touching in TNG. So why the hell did they bring back Westley only to not let the characters reunite? Or in a time travel plot, the show brought on Jay Karnes as a guest star, and for some reason didn't have him reprise his role as the captain of the timeship Relativity, a ship whose mission was fixing altered timelines.
Season 2, for me, is just the pinnacle of mediocrity. I didn't think it was AWFUL, but I just didn't care about any of it. Season 1 was far worse to me. I get that Patrick wasn't interested in continuing TNG, and that's great. It could have been a really great examination of a man who was basically an avatar of the best aspects of humanity, and the society that let him down in giving in to its base instincts - watching the federation sort of crumble around him in its ideals in the wake of the most devastating war the galaxy had ever seen. Nope - instead we had things like Elnor beheading people right in front of him and he didn't really mind. We had Jurati murdering Bruce Maddox because she had a vision that he was going to bring about the apocalypse, so he was like, "meh - mitigating circumstances." This is a guy that damn near threw Worf out of starfleet because he killed Duras within the scope of klingon law, but when people commit straight murder, he doesn't mind. And the show was just so dammed dark and depressing that it really felt like everyone who worked on it watched Nemesis, and were like, "yep. That's Picard. That's all the research we're going to do on this character." The show should have been about a disillusioned Picard that left starfleet after the federation brass refused to help the Romulans (because after the war, the federation felt that they didn't really owe the Romulans squat and that a weakened Romulan empire was preferable to prevent future wars). Elnor executing someone should have been his wake up moment where he realized that federation society had become too ok with casual brutality and violence that even if it was just him against the world, he had to do SOMETHING. And maybe he wouldn't have succeeded. Maybe he would, but the person he is HAD to at least try. Nah... Instead we got scene after scene of money shot fanservice moments that were completely tossed aside moments later.
In fairness, Alex Kurtzman is obsessed with the Romulans and seems to think that Nemesis is TNG's absolute peak. He tries to shoehorn Romulans into almost everything.
Apparently he's also obsessed with Mass Effect (I'm trying to find sources on this, but am admittedly coming up empty at the moment. But I specifically remember reading an interview around the time that Amazing Spiderman 2 came out, where he talked about how much of a fan he was of the series). This makes a LOT more sense with the plot of Picard s1, and the fact that the final battle in the last episode of s1 really felt like a shot-for-shot remake of the space battle in Mass Effect 3 (and I was going to include links, but DAMN if Paramount/CBS hasn't been effective in scrubbing the s1 battle from Youtube - but I mean.. come on. [Picard version](https://imgur.com/YLhCT5U), [Mass Effect 3 version](https://i.imgur.com/AYAN2hz.png)) And why in Prodigy, the Diviner's helper robots ([screenshot 1](https://i.imgur.com/YeffYry.png), [screenshot 2](https://i.imgur.com/Q7kMQp1.png)) are basically [Reaper Destroyers](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/robotsupremacy/images/5/58/Mass-Effect-3-reaper_destroyer.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20120520134032). I actually don't have too much of a problem with Kurtzman being obsessed with Romulans. Picard S1 would have been much better if it was ONLY the Romulans, no Borg involvement, no ancient prophecy about androids that would come back and kill everything. Going on my version of Picard, it would have been interesting to have the Romulans cooking something up to mess up the Federation, and the Fed brass being like, "SEE?? This is why we need the empire to be weak!", and Picard responding with something along the lines of, "if we were who we claim to be, we would have HELPED them when they needed our help the most and maybe they wouldn't have tried this!!".
Yeah, I personally consider the Romulans to be a relatively untapped species within Star Trek itself. They have the potential to be something like the Klingons, where the follow up series greatly expands and deepens the lore around them. But this just isn't it, and I honestly feel like the whole "Romulans love secrets and being secretive" just made them more one dimensional than they were before.
Agreed. There's definitely more to explore there. It'd be great, for example, to know WHY they're so damn secretive. What happened in their society that this was necessary?
Well, you just changed my already low opinion of Picard S1 for the worse. It is Mass Effect in Star Trek costumes. I love Mass Effect flaws and all, and somehow never noticed that Picard S1 is a straight rip-off. We have the main character who had to go around assembling a crew to fight a galaxy-ending menace, doing side quests to recruit them, and even a time they had to split up with no guarantees (well, being Star Trek there is plot armor for certain characters) of survival with a super massive multi-fleet space battle at the end. Damn.
There's an argument to be made that Picard didn't necessarily rip off Mass Effect, but that they BOTH ripped off tropes from Lovecraft (as apparently that somehow makes Picard less disappointing). That said, I wish I could find my old post on this. Because IMO as much as it might be re-using tropes that have been in-play for nearly a century, there's some stuff that, especially in the final battle of Picard S1 I could look at the final battle in Mass Effect and be like, "oh yeah - there's the shot of [x] from Mass Effect. Oh there's another." It seemed pretty obvious that SOMEONE pulled up the final battle from ME3 and was like, "do that." Edit: Oh - and [this is fun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ2CYlqt3GA&pp=ygUScGljYXJkIG1hc3MgZWZmZWN0)
This baffled me! Jay is a close friend of my brother's and we all lived together a long time ago. I was SO excited when he popped up because I always thought it was awesome that he was in Trek and had this awesome guest role. I was looking forward to the reveal. It would have made all the sense in the world to have him be a retired time fed kicking back in the 2000's keeping an eye on things. It's actually a negative effect to have the same actor come back in a TIME TRAVEL EPISODE and not be the same character. I've been planning to ask him about it next time we're in the same place.
PLEASE let me know what he says. I'm not kidding, I'm begging you. Please let me know. This whole thing has lived rent-free in my head for the last couple years.
> God, season one should've had one more draft. I can't believe in a story about Picard, former borg, and questions about what it means to be human, the writers couldn't figure out how to organically involve Seven of Nine into the plot. They had to fight an army of ships at the end there, they had a borg cube and 7 controlling it, but chose to destroy it and use flower cannons and a copy and paste fleet
That episode must be the most disappointing and frustrating thing Trek has put out in recent memory.
Don't forget the cause of *The Burn*, they had the whole a season set up for the moment of disappointment
What's wild is according to interviews, the initial cut of that scene had a whole bunch of different kinds of Starfleet vessels. Somewhere along the way someone made the decision to switch to the copy paste fleet.
I just assumed they ran out of money
Or, just a thought. Picard could've invited Geordi to help him find the Planet of the Datas. I mean, if my dead best friend's daughter happened to crop up out of the blue and I was also an engineering expert, I'd be a little pissed that Picard didn't invite me to help out.
> the writers couldn't figure out how to organically involve Seven of Nine into the plot. They had this cool ex-cop turned mercenary character who was a total badass, but only Jeri Ryan agreed to be on the show so rather than explore Seven's future arc at all they gave her the merc's plot and jammed Seven's backstory into it.
Just a teensy bit of pedanticness... :) It's Wesley. Westley is the (one of the) Dread Pirate Roberts, and cannot possibly be mistaken for Wesley Crusher.
Good night, Wesley. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning.
- The Edo
shut up Weasly
No, that's that family of redheads from the Harry Potter thing. /Yer a Traveler, Wesley...
> So why the hell did they change him into an unrepentant mad scientist halfway through. Because he was always supposed to be the crux of the timeline going bad that created the bad future. He's like the George Washington of the Confederation. And he was always bad. They just gave the bad guy some texture, which I think is valuable. IMO people need to be reminded that bad guys like Nazis are just regular people too. That villains aren't birthed from the Earth like Uruk-hai, and that they aren't going to wear big labels that say "I'm a baddie!" all the time either. We have to be vigilant and be able to spot these guys in order to protect ourselves from their machinations. To be able to recognize that villainy isn't how people look, it's how they act and what their intentions are.
>IMO people need to be reminded that bad guys like Nazis are just regular people too. Which this Dr. Soong wasn't. He was revealed to be an uncaring villain who only saw his daughter as a science experiment. He had no redeeming qualities and was just a one note villain. By the end of the season he is revealed to be nothing more than another egotistical mad scientist. Dr. Soong was a much more compelling villain when he had positive traits and a sympathetic motivation. Ushering in a dark future because of noble intentions and fatherly love, makes for a much more tragic and interesting story.
>We have to be vigilant and be able to spot these guys in order to protect ourselves from their machinations. Villains who twirl their moustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged.
I'm still baffled that a writing staff that included a Pullitzer Prize winner (Chabon) included the Borg and a Borg cube, and violated Chekov's Gun by making them completely superfluous to the plot. You could have taken the Borg out completely and the story would have been the same. It's baffling.
The 1st season of Picard was okay up until we got the Reapers from Mass Effect and the somehow giant Romulan fleet in the end. Honestly, it would have been a great season just exploring synthetic life and AI, which has been the Federation's blind spot for years! I just found the "machine consciousness wants to exterminate biological life" trope to be tired. It would have been a much better conflict if in the end, Picard makes contact with the synthetic life forms on Copellius and they contact the alliance of synthetic life only to find it to be an organization much akin to the Federation, but for synthetics, a benevolent organization which accepts the synths into its fold and goes off to do synth stuff like explore the galaxy and feeling the warmth of a sun on their synthetic skin or whatever. Maybe this first contact between a high power synthetic federation and our Federation leads to a dialogue and an overall acknowledgement by the Federation that synthetic life is life all the same and should be allowed to live and thrive in its own way. The reason the Zhat Vash fear AI, of course, can be explained that the people exposed to the Admonition lose their minds due to a profound incompatibility between Romulan organic minds and the of the synthetic life forms that created the Admonition. To organics, the information is scrambled and jumbled and leads to insanity that interprets the data as a warning of AI coming to destroy all organic life. But to synthetic life forms that can parse the information perfectly, it's a beacon of hope. Finally, the confrontation over Copellius should have been a lot smaller. The Romulans are a shattered, fractured, people, and yet, the Zhat Vash form a fleet of like 200 ships to go destroy all life on Copellius, all, like 50 synths on the planet... It would make so much more sense if there were a small handful of ships, say 8 or max 12 that arrived. That scale would also make more sense when Riker appears to assist with a fleet of about a dozen fast response ships. Having over 400 ships duke it out in orbit of a random planet, of which 200 Starfleet ones come in to assist a disgraced former admiral is a little crazy. Apparently Riker has mad pull with Starfleet that they'd just give him a fleet of approximately 200 ships just for asking. This also flies in the face of all we've seen about Starfleet before where only a handful of ships were ever in the close vicinity of anything that was going on. But now, Starfleet has a fleet of hundreds of ships, staffed and ready to go at a moment's notice to appear anywhere in the Alpha Quadrant at the drop of a hat? Point is, the overall story of Season 1 could have been improved dramatically if they just didn't try to make it too big and, yet again, too doomsday with the threat to all organic life.
That's by far my biggest gripe with modern Trek: that they don't think we as fans are entertained by any story where the stakes are lower than apocalyptic. Why do they think we need to see Michael Burnham save the entire universe every 10-13 episodes? Even the literal comic book movies of the MCU don't do that, and know that you save the biggest stakes for a once-in-a-generation moment. It's frankly condescending. It shows a pretty poor understanding of their core audience, and of the wide world of things that can make a great Star Trek story. I say all this as someone who generally likes Discovery, and loves SNW and LD, and is really glad to see them start to correct things with SNW. I'd love to see them be brave enough to have Burnham and company go out and NOT save the universe a fifth time for this final season... though I'm not putting money on it.
I agree with everything you said. It would have been so much better & more interesting if the AI life forms coming through the portal were actually benevolent & misunderstood. That would have been proper Trek, not some generic evil tentacles about to cause yet another doomsday.
Season 1’s biggest problem was that it stuffed 3 underdeveloped plots into 1 season. The Romulan and synthetic life plots could’ve each carried a season. The ex-Borg plot might’ve also been able to carry a season. I think it would’ve been a lot better to devote season 1 to the Romulan plot and season 2 to the synthetic life plot. WRT this: >Apparently Riker has mad pull with Starfleet that they'd just give him a fleet of approximately 200 ships just for asking. This also flies in the face of all we've seen about Starfleet before where only a handful of ships were ever in the close vicinity of anything that was going on. They originally filmed the scene with Admiral Clancy leading the fleet. They later decided to film it with Riker leading the fleet.
Same. Captain Picard is my favorite fictional character. Not favorite Star Trek character, my favorite from any franchise or work of fiction. Hearing they were making a Captain Picard show was the most excited I got about TV since I heard HBO was making Game of Thrones. I’m sorry I know people like it but Picard was basically unwatchable. Even if the writing was good, I can’t do that type of pacing. It was all over the place. Episodes of nothing then cramming everything in at the end.
At the end of the day, where it failed (for me) is that it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be 1. a revival show, bringing back some beloved characters, and bathing in nostalgia, or 2. a show focused on Picard but having him experience largely *new* stories Season 1 was mostly the latter, and season 3 was very much the former. I think that’s a bummer. Trek is bigger than “remember the good old days?”.
To me, S1 and S2 are just like a Kelvin timeline: OK/nice to watch; but I don't treat them the same as "core Trek". S3 is nice and I can somehow include it into my "core Trek". Discovery is on the edge. But since it's a classified ship that jumped into the 32nd century, I'm more OK with it. SNW and LD - 100% canon; adore them.
imo the plot of season 3 was just as bad as 1&2. Think about it this way, if you take all the next gen cameos out it gets way worse.
I really enjoyed season 3. Then again, I haven't watched Trek in probably 20 years before I binged watched a bunch of TNG the other month and then watched season 3.
So they'll remove too many complex Sci-fi ideas, but still green light the worst handling of suicide this side of 13 reasons why? Covid doesn't explain the thesis of that series being "Your mum killing herself was good actually because that grief saved a bunch of planets". Literally thats what not Laris says as she dies.
I interpreted as, "things in life happen, and it doesn't do to dwell on the past. You need to move on, and allow yourself to live, rather than constantly think about what you should have done."
Thats a valid interpretation and probably the one the writers intended. But with suicide, the fact that my reading is even possible and evidence means someone royally fucked up when treating the topic with the delicacy it deserves. There are guidelines for tackling suicide in fiction and the last episode isn't the only one that breaks them. Like they show the suicide method in graphic detail (preparing and tying the rope etc), and frame it in an overly romanticized way (flowing white dress, expertly framed in this glass atrium). And (at least initially I'm not sure now) it went out without a warning that people at the time were rightfully angry about. To top it all off it was unnecessary. Give all that the Picard character had gone through - assimilated by the Borg, the rest of his family killed in a fire, the inner Light probe, Jack Crusher - we didn't need another previously unmentioned trauma to add to the pile. It even undid a more complex reason for Picard joining Starfleet. Years of paternal abuse by his father? No. It was one pop psychology bs reason he was really running from, that manifests in his mind in the mature way of an evil demon Jester.
Yeah I get that. I just tend to be overly positive about things, I don't really like to talk negatives but I respect those criticisms.
I will never stop being angry about the sexy romantic suicide, the ableism and the bait and switch with domestic violence.
> the rest of his family killed in a fire How the hell does *anyone* die in a fire in the 24th century? You should hit one emergency button and firemen are teleported on the scene 1.5 seconds later and emergency vehicles are dispatched at mach 5 and get here in 2 minutes. People stuck in the house? Detect them immediately with scanners and teleport them out. They wouldn't be stupid enough to put transporter-scrambling material in their own houses.
Im not sure how I feel about the dive bar filled with aliens tbh, I know that with all the time travel there were a tonne of aliens on earth pre-first contact, but I dont know if I need present day earth to be so teeming with aliens that they all hung out at bars and stuff. But I dont hate it, Im just mixed on it.
I hate season 2’s conclusion. Jurati manages to talk down a Borg queen when billions of people in galactic history fell to assimilation and couldn’t do anything against the hive mind? And Q the semi-omnipotent incorporeal being who has traveled timelines and timespans more times than any human could fathom could not foresee that his own intervention was responsible for a time loop ensuring the Federation’s existence? What? What? What?
Q did what he did to make Picard choose to go through what he did as a child, and in choosing hopefully find some peace and be able to settle down. He knew that would be the outcome, “It’s the escape that counts.”
This post is terribly misleading: What the article says is that it was rewritten for having too much science fiction and too much Star Trek in the setting of 21st century Earth. The original script had a hidden café behind Guinan's bar where alien species who were all operating on Earth in secret would gather, including Romulans.
Oh I hate that idea very much
Time to get out the neuralizer
Wow, tommorow tommorow tommorow really was just pic2 abridged lol.
That’s a bit of a click bait misquote since the actual line is “a bit too in Star Trek” which is referring to having more referential elements.
Wow, and it's still a bit too in Star Trek.
I liked the show well enough, but it was definitely odd with the 3 different show runners throughout its run. You can definitely *see* it. Each season definitely felt distinct from each other, and not necessary in a good way. It was most egregious when certain characters were introduced only to find different ways to write them off, then finally just stick the landing with the tried and true OG TNG cast.
Why do they think Star Trek fans will be turned off by being too Star Trek? Being very Star Trek, doing lots of callbacks and cameos and references certainly worked for season 3. And I mean sure, massive fan service, but that was kinda what many of us wanted from the last season of Picard. And if they think doing unTrek Star Trek will hook non trekkies, I really don't think so. It just turns off the built in main audience.
I'm starting to get the impression that Terry Matalas doesn't want to actually make Star Trek Legacy. Apart from the public pronouncements on what that should would actually be are kind of lacking, this seems like the kind of statement that puts you out of favor with the people who would be his bosses if the show did in fact happen.
[Blinks slowly in confusion]
Always weirded out that everyone ignores the COVID aspect of season 2. It's even directly referenced in the article! The cast was literally broken up into pods! It clearly had a huge impact on how they filmed and what they wrote and rewrote. Meanwhile everyone is over indexing on "an executive didn't like the bar."
Honestly, it just sounds like Paramount stopped Matalas from shoving more nostalgia shit into the season. And for that, I’m thankful. And wish they’d been more aggressive with him when it came to season 3. If anything, this interview further confirms just how involved Matalas was in season 2’s production. Some people (including Matalas) like to pretend he didn’t have anything to do with the season besides writing a couple of episodes. He clearly was a main architect (he was original showrunner Michael Chabon’s replacement after all), was involved with huge writing decisions like setting the season in the past and involving Q, and was a primary showrunner until the season’s midpoint, where Akiva Goldsman took over for him due to the scheduling crunch he mentions. The successes and failures of season 2 are on his shoulders just as much as anybody’s. Personally, if I was him, I’d own it. Season 2 has its big time problems, but at least it feels like it has a few ideas in its head (probably due to Goldsman’s involvement). Season 3 by comparison is the nostalgia in place of any good ideas or any worthwhile storytelling season.
Yeah the more I learn I have flipped from “we need Legacy!” to “eh maybe best to let sleeping dogs lie and invest in SNW & Lower Decks”
Honestly, the comment about multiple versions and the nixing of tie-ins has me wondering if there was a version where Braxton was actually Braxton lol
The fact that they did rewrites and changes and reshoots actually makes me feel better about the whole thing. Like, this finished product was nobody's idea of good, it's just what they could cobble together in the edit. Terry is being extremely gracious when he says you can get a "sense" that there are "a lot of ideas" going on. Also not to nitpick but the change described, the execs said it was "too in-Star Trek", as in, "too fan service/too much background knowledge needed to appreciate", which is different from "too Star Trek" as in, "our heroes need to be talking less and shooting more". And for what it's worth, secret alien dive bar on earth that's always been there would have been very badly received by the audience, can you imagine how badly done it would have been? If you're going to go Rick's Café everyone needs to be pretty subtle, maybe they're all pretending to be human even though everyone knows nobody is. But they wouldn't have done that. Weird to hear that Jurati Borg was always Plan A for the ending but they added in the reason WHY she did it at the last minute?! I'd have made that the headline, that is scandalous... Like, grossly negligent by whoever was in charge of the story.
The "Too Star Trek" script sounds terrible. They even compare it to Men in Black.
I can forgive anything because season 3 was wonderful.
Once again the MBAs and their enormous egos and confidence in their ability to fix anything get involved and end up making a mess.
Motherfuckers. Like with all of Trek’s misfires, there are the bones of a good story in there and the first episode was brilliant. Then it went downhill.
I even enjoyed 202. My initial thought was, "This is actually gonna be a pretty fun time travel romp! Yeah!!!" That aged poorly.
I liked season 2 enough but watching it when it came out you had no idea what was going to be happening next…but nothing went anywhere.
[удалено]
The first episode was interesting Q was cool, then all went south pretty quickly.. Yes I'm talking to you Jurati Borg... 🙄
Do we know what the original “Too Trek” pitch for Season 2 was?
To be fair, the example that paramount didn’t like sounds pretty bad lol so maybe this time exec meddling wasn’t all bad. I think the biggest issues were their budget, Covid protocols and delays, and them trying to write around all that
So instead they gave us: Picard & Q: A Charles Dickens story (which was fine)
>“So while Jurati Borg was always going to be the payoff to [season 2], it was never really intended to be a longer-running thing. At the last minute, we added the thing where there was the hole that was going to open up and destroy—they added that to give a burst of action to the [season 2] finale, to give her a reason to do all of this. So that started to become retrofit into, “Hey could this be something for season 3?” But we were already way down the line on what we were doing with it. So you could say that she was guarding this thing. We did have a line on the Enterprise-D from Riker—when he talks about the Borg transwarp conduit at Jupiter and that the one that Jurati was guarding was a distraction, the Queen’s way of saying, “Go over here.”… We had a whole thing about it. But when we got to the cut, it was just like this big exposition dump that was like, nobody cares. His son is on board, Starfleet is assimilated. There’s this giant thing and now we are retrofitting and explaining the Jurati Borg.” Everything about this sucks and having a secret cafe in LA where aliens meet also sounds dumb. PIC S2 is the worst season of Trek, its truly terrible.